Creativity coach and author Julia Cameron comments on part of the challenge of being actively creative:

“Creativity involves process, and process involves change. The truism we often hear is that we often resist change because change is difficult or change is painful.

“This is not quite accurate. It is the resistance to change that is difficult or painful. In the same way, it is the resistance to our creativity that causes us to equate it with suffering.”

Living a creative life and stress

A description for one of the weekly sessions of the online course Your Best Life in the Arts, by Eric Maisel, says:

“Life produces stress, the artistic personality produces additional stress, creating produces even more stress, and living the artist’s life is the topper! Learn how to identify the stressors in your life and how to implement stress management techniques…”

Dr. Maisel also comments about anxiety for creative people: “For someone who’s self-identified as a writer, painter, composer, scientist, inventor, and so on, his identity and ego are wrapped up in how well he creates—and when what we do matters that much, we naturally get anxious.”

In this video – “Acquiring a Creative Mind” – Maisel expands on the idea of questioning if we “have no talent” – a kind of existential dread that can be deeply stressful for some high ability people, including artists.

Dr. Maisel comments, “People who aren’t currently creative or who have always wanted to be creative and have difficulties getting started, think that it’s something about talent: that maybe they’re not quite talented enough and actually they are very disappointed in themselves and maybe even depressed because maybe they have a masters in fine arts or a masters in creative writing and they can’t quite understand why they can’t get their creative work done. And from my point of view, it is most often about them not being able to get their mind quiet enough for ideas to percolate.”

Eric Maisel, PhD is the author of many books to help people enhance their creative work, including:

About Douglas Eby

Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the Talent Development Resources series of sites including High Ability; Highly Sensitive and Creative; The Creative Mind and others - which provide "Information and inspiration to enhance creativity and personal development." Also see Résumé.

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The Creative Mind is part of a series of sites by Douglas Eby - providing information and inspiration for exploring your creativity and personal development.